ELIZA

Historical perspective: This type of modern AI psychosis first appeared with ELIZA in 1966. Created by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was the world’s first chatbot and simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by reflecting users' text back to them as questions. Weizenbaum was alarmed to discover that brief interactions with the simple program quickly induced deep emotional reliance and powerful delusional thinking in otherwise normal users, including his own secretary, who asked him to leave the room so she could speak privately with the machine. Weizenbaum coined this term to describe how humans anthropomorphize rudimentary code, treating deterministic patterns as conscious or wise entities.

ELIZA is not an acronym, the program was named after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class flower girl in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion who learns to speak with an upper-class accent. The "ELIZA effect" reflects how the computer program learned to converse and mirror human language incrementally, much like the character in the play.